Performance Art

In the flier to the works of the Sichuan artist Chen Quilin I just wrote about, I noticed an expression which I have heard a number of times in other articles about art and in connection with the prosecution of certain political activist in connection with criminal damage of certain statues in the public parks or squares in Hong Kong but I have never bothered to find out what exactly is meant by the expression "performance art".  What is performance art? I looked it up in Wikipedia ("Wiki") and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ("SEP"). The following is what I found.

According Wiki, performance art is a performance presented anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time, to an audience, scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated, spontaneous or carefully planned, with or without audience participation, live or via media, with the performer, an individual or a group present or absent, in any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. It is a contested concept.

In the narrow sense, performance art is closely related to certain strands in the postmodernist art traditions in the West in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, derived from the concepts of visual art by such figures as Antonin Artaud, the Dadaist movement,  the so-called Situationists, Fluxus, installation art and conceptual art. It tends to be defined as "an antithesis to theatre" and strives to challenge orthodox artforms and cultural norms. It is often "an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer and audience" in a so-called "event" which could not be repeated, captured or bought. How concepts of visual arts and concepts of performing arts are in fact used may determine the meaning of a performance art presentation (vide. Marvin Carlson Performance: A Critical Introduction by (1996), pp. 103-105).

Performance is a "conceptual art" concept. Its content-based meaning is usually conveyed in a dramatic way. Performance is seldom done for entertainment or for its own sake. It is seldom done at a conventional theatre nor does it usually seek to depict a set of fictitious characters in a formal script with a linear narrative. It may involve the performer speaking to the audience or spectator directly or deliberately ignoring  their expectations. However, some  performance art can be close to more conventional performing arts in that it may have a script or a fictitious dramatic setting but even so, it seldom follows the usual dramatic norm of creating a fictitious setting with a linear script which follows conventional real-world dynamics but may deliberately seek to satirize or transcend such real-world dynamics in conventional normal theatrical plays. Often, the intention of performance art is to challenge the audience into thinking in new and unconventional ways, into breaking down the conventions of traditional arts or even in challenging the concept of  "what art is". As long as the performer does not become a player who repeats a role, performance art can include satirical elements (cf. Blue Man Group), the use of robots and machines as performers, as in pieces of the Survival Research Laboratories or borrowing elements of any performance arts like dance, music and circus. Performance art may include what has been called body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry and inter-media. Some artists prefer to call it "live art", "action art" , e.g. the Viennese Actionists and the neo-Dadaists "intervention" or "manoeuvre"  or simply "actions".

The SEP article says that conceptual art has a tendency to provoke intense and perhaps even extreme reactions in its audiences in that whilst some people find it very refreshing and the only kind of art that is relevant to today's world, many others consider it shocking, distasteful, skill-less, downright bad, or, and most importantly, not art at all. You either love it or hate it or don't know anything about it. This is by no means an accident because it is the aim of most conceptual art to be deliberately controversial. It seeks to challenge our thoughts about what art is and to make us question our assumptions not only about what may properly qualify as art and what the artist's function should be, but also what our role as spectators should involve, and how we should relate to art.  Thus by reacting strongly to conceptual art we are playing right into its hands.

The art historian Paul Wood says that it is " not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual art’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include. .... conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists… Then again, regarded under a different aspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present." (Paul Wood Conceptual Art 2002, 6). It aims in particular to challenge the notion that the principal aim of art is to produce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. To the conceptual artists including performance artists, art is redundant if it does not make us think but they face a dilemma in that most artistic institutions are not conducive to reflection and prefer to continue to promote a consumerist conception of art and artists based on beauty and technical skill.  The task of conceptual artists is thus to encourage a revisionary understanding of art, artist, and artistic experience. The means of artistic expression, we are told, are infinite and the topics available for questioning and discussion are thus limitless. It adopts alternative means of expression, including performances, photography, films, videos, events, bodies, media, new ready-mades and new mixed media.In short, nothing whatsoever can be ruled out in principle as a possible artistic media, as can be seen, for example, in Richard Long's photograph of a line made in the grass by walking; Bruce Nauman's nine minute film of the artist himself playing one note on a violin whilst walking around in his studio; and Piero Manzoni's act of signing a woman's arm. There may thus be as many definitions of what conceptual art is as there are conceptual artists.

One of the most important areas the conceptual and performance artists work on is to explore where utility ends and where art begins. In particular, some of them emphasize art as a process rather than as a material thing, a consumer product. As such, the artwork is no longer something that can be grasped merely by seeing, hearing or touching the end product of that process. They stress not only the role of the actor (the artist) but also that of the  traditional "spectator" or "consumer" of the artwork in the artistic process.  In many cases, the ‘art-making’ and the ‘artwork’ come together, as what is sought is an identification of the notion of the work of art with the conceptual activity of the artist. It combines art with criticism and turns the artist into a social and cultural critic, To use the words of Joseph Kosuth ( Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990 ), it ‘both annexes the functions of the critic, and makes a middle-man unnecessary.’ (Guercio 1999, 39). But the most radical concept of performance art seems to be the way it proclaims that  "art" is an art of the mind rather than of the senses: it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates the artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of objects. To them, ‘the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ (Sol LeWitt ( ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’. Artforum, Vol. 5, No. 10, 1967, pp. 79-83.)1967, 166). In the words of Kosuth, ‘[t]he actual works of art are ideas’ (Lucy Lippard  Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966-1972 1973, 25).The artwork becomes "a focus of appreciation" or critical or creative "reflection" rather than a material object as such. Art is thus ‘de-materialised’ and becomes rooted in the agency of the artist. They think that if art is de-materialised, it is less likely to be institutionalized. In accordance with this conception of art, art has become a reflective activity of the mind: it is cerebral, not emotive and its "representation" is generally semantic rather than illustrative i.e. it sets out to have and convey a strong meaning rather than to depict a scene, person or event. It is semantic in the sense of "presenting a meaning, or having a meaning" ie. to convey a meaning which cannot be "seen" or "non-visual" ie. to represent something one cannot see with the naked eye such that its meaning lies behind the visual images. Accordingly, the conceptual artist's task is to contemplate and formulate this meaning – to be a ‘meaning-maker’. The performance artists aim to provoke the "consumer" of artworks into a "co-creator" and participator in the "creative process" or "event" itself through the active use of his own mind and imagination.

According to the author of the Wiki, Western cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the Russian Constructivists, Futurists and Dada, the last of which providing a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry, often at the Cabaret Voltaire by such artists as Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara and Russian Futurist artists like David Burliuk who painted his face for his actions (1910–20), Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova may be identified as precursors of performance art. According to the art critic Harold Rosenberg, in the 1940s and 1950s, Action Painting gave artists the freedom to perform using the canvas as "an arena in which to act", thereby rendering the paintings as traces of the artist's performance in his/her studio. Abstract expressionism and Action painting preceded the Fluxus movement and Happenings and Performance Art. Now performance art is no longer confined to America and the West but has spread to Asia and Latin America. Performance artists and theorists point to different traditions and histories, ranging from tribal to sporting and ritual or religious events.

According to the Wiki, certain Renaissance artists had already put on public performances which could be said to be ancestors of performance art and it was anticipated, if not explicitly formulated, by the Japanese Gutai group in 1950s in such works as Asuko Tanaka's "Electric Dress" (1956). Yves Klein too can be considered a precursor of performance art with such conceptual works as Zone de Sensibilité Picturelle Immatériale ((Zones of immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) (1959–62) and the photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void). In the late 1960s, such Earth artists as Robert Smithsons, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Carl Andre had already created environmental pieces which anticipated the works of the later performance artists of the 1970s. The works of such conceptual artists in the early 1980s like Sol LeWitt who converted mural-style drawing into an act of performance by others were influenced by Yves Klein and the Earth artists as well. Works like "Wall piece for orchestra“ (1962) of Yoko Ono, Meat Joy (1964) of  Carolee Schneemann, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) by Joseph Beuys, A naked flag burning on the Brooklyn Bridge (1968) by Yayoi Kusama and the Happenings(a term first used by Allan Kaprow, in the 1960's) of Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman and Wolf Vostell ..  A Happening allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells. In a Happening, e.g  Kaprow's "Happenings in the New York Scene," (1961), the audience may without being aware of it, become performers. 

Some people consider that the "Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries" (Orgien- und Mysterien Theater)(1962) of Herman Nitch a precursor of performance art. Others think that the staged events and performances sponsored by Andy Warhol in New York in the mid-60s like those by the Velvet Underground and such an event as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) which include live Rock music, exploding lights and film as precursors. .

Examples of fluxus action, happenings, interventions, manoeuvres etc. which may be classified as performance art include the following:

1. Chris Burden's Shoot (1971) in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters and Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1971)

2. The fluxus performance of Carollee Schneemann's Eye Body (1963), Interior Scroll (1975) in which she showed her own female body, and those of  Robert Whitman and Nam June Park, starting from the 1960s on

3. The self-video documentation of Gilbert and George in Britain in the 1970's, creating what they call their "living sculpture" performance like being painted in gold and singing "Underneath The Arches" for extended periods.

4. Joan Jonas's video of her experimental performances in 1972 and Laurie Anderson's performance of Duets on Ice (1973) on New York's streets and Marina Abramović's conceptual violation of her own body (1973)

5. Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh's  Art/Life: One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (July 1983.July 1984), and Karen Finlay’s I'm an Ass Man 1987.

6. The "performance poetry" of Hedwig Gorski shortly before 1982  to distinguish her text-based vocal performances from performance art, especially the work of performance artist, such as Laurie Anderson's, who worked with music at that time. Such performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who themselves were inspired by the visual art genres of painting and sculpture.

7. In the 1990's, with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc countries, performance art by such artists like Hungary's Gyögy Galántai and the Russia's Collective Action Group  began to come out into the open surface and also in Cuba, the Caribbean and PRC e.g Zhang Huan who first began underground in the 1980s.

It was said that "In these contexts performance art became a critical new voice with a social force similar to that found in Western Europe, the United States and South America in the 1960s and early 1970s. It should be emphasized that the eruption of performance art in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, South Africa, Cuba, and elsewhere should never be considered either secondary to or imitative of the West."and  Sally Barnes has written “… by the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known that it no longer needed to be defined; mass culture, especially television, had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Willem Dafoe and Anne Magnuson had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment.”

In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (2001), Rose lee Golden  wrote that "performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of the public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise." and by the 1990s, sophisticated performance art became part of the cultural mainstream in the West and performance art gained admittance into art museums as an art form.This shows the force of consumerism and the ubiquitous commercialization of art. Thus the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective and performance recreation of the work of Marina Abramović from 14th March to 31st May 2010. the biggest exhibition of performance art in its history. During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.  A support group for the "sitters," "Sitting with Marina," was established on Facebook. The performance attracted celebrities such as Bjork and James Franco and got coverage on the internet by Tao Lin, a New York writer.

The following photos and captions were taken from the Wikipedia article:

Yves Klein and Dino Buzzati engaged in the ritual transfer of immateriality, January 26, 1962

Conceptual work by Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960, photo by Harry Shunk. Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void)

Chris Burden during the performance of his 1974 piece Trans-fixed where he was nailed to the back of a Volkswagen

Performance artist Joseph Beuys in 1978: Jeder Mensch ein Künstler — Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus (Every person an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism)

Stelarc's "Parasite: Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body" (1997) Ars Electronica Festival

Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, 9. November 2005

Marina Abramović performing in "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art, May 2010